Last week I spent my time working at a summer camp, something I do every summer. I’ve done a little work on some of the camp vehicles in the past, but this year I got to do a couple full days of work on them.
Disclaimer: I do not recommend these repairs for vehicles driven on public roads. This truck is used only on private property at low speeds.
Another for the list of things I’ve never seen before. A Civic came in after badly overheating because of a damaged radiator. It overheated so badly that it melted the dipstick.
One of the more common suspension parts to need replacement, in my experience, are sway bar links. Up here in New York, or in other states where rust is an issue, it isn’t always easy to loosen the nuts holding the sway bar links. Instead of the nut turning, the nut spins with the stud in the ball-and-socket in the end of the link. Some techs try to keep it from spinning with vise grips, but I’ve rounded off the teeth of enough of my vise grips to move over to the technique I’ll show in this post.
If it looks like this, it probably isn’t coming off without a fight, so here’s how I deal with it.
Tire pressure monitoring systems have been required on new cars in the US since 2007. Because of that, you should always know when your tires are getting low or flat without having to look at them or check the pressures yourself, meaning there’s no excuse for driving on a flat tire.
I just bought what may be my most expensive tool, though for more than just cars. My latest purchase, a Canon Rebel T5i:
Sometimes you have to wonder how a customer either didn’t notice a problem, or didn’t care enough to get it checked out. I’ve worked on many cars with so many indications of major problems, sometimes very unsafe problems, but somehow the owner didn’t know.
My typical procedure when a car comes in with the low tire pressure light on is to first check all the pressures, because temperature changes can cause all the pressures to change equally and cause the light to come on, and then if only one tire is low, I then put it up on the lift.
I was doing some work on a Honda Ridgeline when the front bumper caught my eye.
Earlier this week I wrote about using fluorescent dye to find leaks in air conditioning systems. Sometimes dye doesn’t help and you have to use other methods, such as a leak detector, or just by looking carefully.
A common way to find the source of an air conditioning refrigerant leak is to inject fluorescent dye into the system. Once dye is circulating in the system, if there is a leak the dye will also leak out, and you can find where it’s leaking by shining a blacklight around various system components.
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Mechanical Malarkey 